A SLICING DEVICE-USE OF WATER MEDIUM FOR CLEAN CUTTING

One of the unit operations in food processing is cutting to reduce the size of raw materials to the desired size range. Slicing, dicing and cutting into different shapes, all need knives and other sharp gadgets. Time has changed since man used knives made of steel, copper and other metals to make knives and other cutting tools by a variety of domestic chores as well as for food processing as more and more mechanical and electric devices are being introduced to increase productivity and reduce manual intervention as far as possible. Special metal alloys have emerged which are robust and precise working for long time without losing their sharpness. In food industry, use of stainless steel knives and cutting blades have become standard because of the ease with which they can be cleaned up to avoid cross contamination of food in manufacturing facilities. Still contamination can still be a problem due to negligence and oversight. It is in this context that high pressure water jet cutting system is considered super efficient for food industry. High pressure water jets using Ultra High  Pressure (UHP) has been in use for some time for a variety of cutting operations in products like pizza, cakes, meat, fish, candy bars, french fries, many frozen foods etc but it gained added importance with food safety concerns due to pathogen contamination increasing day by day, especially in the US and the EU. Here is a peep into this marvelous cutting tool of immaculate efficiency.  

There are many wonders of engineering, confined to the labs and warehouses of industry, that we laypeople never get to see. That's the case with the water jet cutter, which fires out a thin stream of water through a diamond nozzle at nearly the speed of sound and can slice through everything from peaches to linoleum with the greatest of ease. It's been around in some form since the 1950s, but if you're not in the business of cutting things into ever-smaller pieces, you may not have come across it. Here is a cutter made by Paprima going through beets like a knife through butter: If you've never chopped a beet, let me enlighten you: beets are like spheres of wood. You may be tempted to pull out a hatchet to make any kind of serious progress—or, you could reach for a tiny stream of pressurized water. That stream of water has a delicate touch, too. It can slice through food items as fragile as canned peaches and leave not a scratch on them, except for a thin line of empty space. It also, as long as the water is clean, does not leave bacteria on them, which is a downside of using a metal knife to process sliced foods.

According to experts familiar with water jet cutting technology, pure water cutting has several advantages which include good sanitary protection, prevention of cross contamination, steady pressure of water ensuring uniform cutting and versatility to manage precise cutting, slitting, portioning etc using a pump generating 90000 psi pressure. Because of the high pressure water gets evaporated instantly without ever wetting the product subjected to cutting. The technology requires use of specific cutting nozzles for each application and food industry can manage the floor level processing without the need to remove the conventional cutting blades, cleaning them regularly and drying before using for the next operation. Since the high pressure jet nozzle does not come in contact with the food, contamination is never a serious issue. More over under such high pressures no microbe can survive for causing any future problem.


V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
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